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Monday, 11 January 2016

Detachable People - Catherine Butler

When I was a teenager, I often wondered (who hasn’t?) what
it would be like to be suddenly transported back in time, and find myself in –
shall we say? – Restoration England. Let’s suppose that that despite my uncouth
garb and speech I escaped being imprisoned or hanged as a witch and made it to
the Royal Society, usually my first port of call in these situations. My immediate
goal would be to seek out Robert Hooke or Christopher Wren (Isaac Newton being
too irascible), universally curious men who might choose to protect me because
of all the interesting things I could teach them about inventions yet to come.
What fun I’d have, telling them all about the future! How impressed they would be!

These reveries always ended badly, however, because I
realised I couldn’t tell them much at all. I knew that cars and televisions
existed, of course, but not how they worked – or not well enough to be any use
in helping to build one. Even the less ambitious gadgets – say, bicycles, which Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee introduced to King Arthur’s court in similar
circumstances – defeated my feeble ingenuity. In short, I was a useless time
traveller, and in most cases it wasn’t long before Hooke’s patience was exhausted
and I was committed to Bedlam. (Quite possibly this has actually happened to
some people. We may never know.)

A far better game was having someone come from the past to visit
my own time, and being able to show them round the twentieth century. Nothing
beat the pleasure of reducing Leonardo da Vinci to a gape-mouthed yokel as he
clapped eyes on a helicopter that actually worked. Although I knew little about engineering, this time all I had to say was, “Get a load of that.” Such technological glories
certainly impressed my guests (not only Leonardo: Francis Bacon and Jane Austen
were also very taken), and I liked to think that a little of the stardust rubbed
off on me. That at least, was the way my daydreams generally played out, before
my attention was drawn back to the logarithms and ox bow lakes of my
1970s classroom.

Why have I shared these revealing details about my teenage psyche? Well, lately I’ve been thinking about “detachability” – that is, the
extent to which you can take characters (real or imagined) out of one context
and plonk them down in another, and what happens when you try. Time travel is
only one way to do this, of course. In these days of mash-ups, crossovers and
fan fiction (not that any of these are new inventions), we’re quite used to
seeing characters from one storyverse turn up in another. Dickensian, currently showing on BBC television, has people from multiple
Dickens novels bumping into each other freely, and I’ve even come across
numerous fictions on page and screen in which Dickens himself makes an
appearance.

It’s strange, though, how some characters seem to be more detachable
than others. In Shakespeare, for example, Falstaff is a supremely detachable
character, appearing not only in the Henry
IV history plays but also in an Elizabethan domestic comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor – a play cooked up, tradition has it, after Queen
Elizabeth demanded a story showing “Falstaff in love”. He was later inserted
into stories and plays by several non-Shakespearian hands, too. On the other
hand, it’s hard to imagine a play successfully depicting Hamlet’s scrapes as a
student in Wittenberg, or even his courtship of Ophelia. Why is that? Not,
presumably, because Hamlet is a less fully realised character than Falstaff.
But somehow he’s harder to take out of the context of those unfortunate events
in Elsinore.

I once amused myself with the fancy that Peter Pan, Doctor Who and Dracula were all one and the same person. After all, they have a lot in
common:

How Academics Spend Their Time

It’s funny how you never see them together, isn’t it? But
they’re also all detachable: Peter Pan has become a symbol far beyond Barrie’s
novel (you know you’ve made it when you get a Syndrome named after you); the
Doctor has wandered through genres and storyverses quite as much as through
time and space; Dracula has spawned a brood of fictional avatars large enough
to warm even his cold heart. Maybe they’re all dipping into the
same archetypal well? Maybe, in fact, detachable characters all have a smack of
the archetype?

Who are the other great detachables? Scrooge? Don Quixote? Gulliver,
perhaps? They’re a select group – and exclusively male, as far as I can see. For
all the famous and vivid female characters in literature, for both children and
adults, I can think of none who has had this kind of peripatetic and
self-renewing existence, at least outside the realms of legend and mythology. Pippi
Longstocking? Jane Eyre? Miss Marple? Anne of Green Gables? Lady Macbeth? They ought to detach, I feel, and be free to appear, not just in sequels but in whole other storyverses. But I can’t think of any examples.

16 comments:

Yup. I did all that. (Still do). Isaac Newton is all right once you get to know him. Just don't mention Albert.

I wonder if Mary Poppins is a detachable female character? She seems a strong contender.

I did write a book once where the protagonist was a supporting character detached from an abortive novel. She was the only good thing about the abandoned story, and transferred well into an entirely new setting. It probably happens quite a lot to characters in draft.

Nick, that's brilliant. I want to see Mary Poppins in the Tardis. She would soon sort out all those broken-backed storylines and sentimental tosh about the Byronic Wandering Man of Sorrows they've turned the Doctor into. I can see Mary Poppins as an ideal Doctor.

Alice, yes. I wondered about Murder in Pemberley, or whatever it was called. A straight sequel might not be enough of a detachment from the original context to count, but that was also a change of genre, so I can see that. Fairytale characters certainly: I rather bundled them (in my mind at least) with mythical and legendary figures.

@Katherine Mary Poppins as the Doctor gets my vote! Bursting into song at every turn!

A spoonful of gold dust helps a cyberman fall down!Reversing the polarity will soon inverse your frown!With a just a clove of garlic, watch me now repel this DalekAnd a vampire with some damp wire – no, the other way around!

*Love* those rhymes, Nick!Yes, I think it's possible if they are the right archetype. And that would mean there will be female characters who are detachable even if they haven't actually been detached. Baba Yaga springs to mind anyway. Sheherazade? We could do this!

My series Vampire Dawn was a bit like playing the meetings-with-dead-people game, with the huge advantage of being paid to do it. I picked historical figures, decided they were vampires and had them live into the 21st century. Got to play with Pasteur, Guillotin, etc as living (but old) characters - great fun.

Very interesting. Alice (from Wonderland) and Dorothy (from Oz) are both recognisable enough that they pop up quite often in other stories, but they don't hold the centre of the story in the same way as Dr Who, Bond, Holmes, etc. Perhaps there needs to be an emptiness at the heart of the character for them to be so inhabitable by other actors and applicable to other stories?

Also: is there any reason why Dr Who hasn't been played by a woman? Or has he/she?

I clicked to comment with the Mary Poppins suggestion only to find I'd been beaten. She obviously is one that we instantly recognise would work anywhere. (I love the idea of her as the doctor, and you're right, MIssy is definitely a bit Mary Poppins...) I can also imagine the White Witch finding her way into a few other universes or times (maybe because C.S. Lewis did exactly that in The Magician's Nephew, so we already know what mayhem she would cause in Victorian London...)

Death. Obviously Death a completely an archetype and so completely detachable but Death has regularly been turned into a great character. My favourites are in Terry Pratchett's novels, Marcus Zuzak's The Book Thief and Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Death is usually portrayed as male, but in Gaiman's Sandman Death of the Endless is a lovely, compassionate young goth woman.